Carson Daly used to be the face of MTV. Now he's less famous--but more successful.

Four years ago he stood at the center of the teen universe, a genial Dick Clark for the Britney Spears generation. As host of MTV's daily afternoon celebfest, TRL, Carson Daly made himself an overnight star, gracing teenzine covers and dating starlets. Now teen pop is passé, and he rarely appears on MTV, let alone in Tiger Beat. But Daly, 30, has parlayed fleeting fame into recurring revenue. Through a nationally syndicated radio show and a late-night talk show on NBC, he reaches more people than he ever did at MTV. This year he should make $7 million--more than triple the $2 million he got at his peak as a pop idol.

"My priorities have completely shifted gears on that whole notion of 15 minutes of fame," he says. "Being a workaholic is my defense against losing the good life."

Daly grew up in a modest neighborhood in Palm Springs, Calif., but tasted success early on. After a year on a golf scholarship at Loyola Marymount University, he left in 1993 to intern at a Palm Springs radio station. (His then-boss, Jimmy Kimmel, is now his late-night rival.) Three years later, at age 23, Daly landed an on-air job at KROQ, an influential outlet in Los Angeles. In 1997 he began moonlighting at MTV, appearing on air for an extra $600 a day; that fall he quit the KROQ job to join MTV full-time, grabbing a one-year, $100,000 contract. By 1998 Daly was on TRL (Total Request Live), filmed live at MTV's Times Square studio, playing host to Kid Rock, the Backstreet Boys and other artists who were just heating up, and becoming a household name (among the junior-high set) himself.

But how to survive after the buzz died down? Daly quickly capitalized on his fame, persuading MTV, notorious for paying its talent little and replacing it frequently, to lock in guaranteed compensation starting in 1999. By year-end 2005 he will have earned $8 million from the cable channel, even though he stopped hosting TRL in 2003. But he resisted multimillion-dollar offers from the big broadcast networks to do another TRL. "Everybody was coming to me trying to do a big, blown-out version of TRL, network style. I just couldn't do that. It was time to reinvent."

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